I thought I would post a little pensee that anticpates next week's discussion topic. In the Northlands, the online community I run with my partner we are both administrators. We have the same ideals and beliefs for the community - but we go about 'facilitating' those ideal differently.
I am interventionist. If something is wrong or someone is behaving inappropriately I deal with it, often publically. I have deleted posts, whole discussion threads - taken away people's posting rights, and even taken away moderation and admin powers. These actions are usually accompanied by a private message to the involved parties, explain what I did and why.
Dom on the other hand tried to nudge people in the right direction by posting with them publically. He behaves like a 'regular' member of the board and tries to reason, in the context of the discussion or, as if often the case, argument. He will at the request of another member delete offensive posts. But it is always in response to complaints, and never because his own sense of (in)justice prompts him to take action.
At work I am the academic manager and my senior teacher is a guy called Manjit. I manage people at work in a similar way to how I manage people at The Northlands. I deal with them directly, getting to the core of the issues that are causing inappropriate behaviour. I talk to teacher x about his anger, and teacher y about her depression. I tell them my concerns about how I percieve it is affecting (or may affect) their performance. In cases of extreme underperformance I give people the chance to change and if they don't I put them on a perfomance plan, take away a post of responsibility or in extreme cases ask them to leave.
Manjit is like Dom, much more subtle. He manages underperformance when has resulted in a complaint from a student or some other concrete outcome (i.e. a covering teacher hasn't been able to plan a lesson because the main teacher hasn't completed their admin fully). He will grumble and worry, but he will not hand the teacher the responsibility for changing their behaviour until he has external evidence which he can take to them and ask them to explain, justify and ultimately correct.
It is easier to reflect on the actions of others than oneself but if I were to try and analyse these different management styles I would say I see myself as a guardian of the people whereas Dom and Manjit are guardians of the process.
Keywords: IDEL08, managing people, online communities, performance
Comments
Hi Tracy
Some intriguing thoughts.
“We have the same ideals and beliefs for the community - but we go about 'facilitating' those ideal differently.” I wonder if the different facilitation style sactually reflect some differences in ideals and beliefs. As you conclude “I would say I see myself as a guardian of the people whereas Dom and Manjit are guardians of the process.” Perhaps that suggests a different value between yourself and these other facilitators?
Have you come across Judith Butler’s notion of performativity? A useful summary is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativity, though her on writing on it is much much thicker (and slightly impenetrable!). J I wonder if this idea might help you tease out why different facilitation processes might come from similar values (perhaps you are “performing” different things?).
Cheers
C.
Very true, I am sure our values aren't identical - we have similar notions about treading the line between feedom of speech and respecting each other. Which can roughly be translated (in the case of our online community) as: you can say what you think as long as you aren't an asshole about it.
When I say Dom is the guardian of the process I mean he has a system and if that breaks down he intervenes. People discuss, they get heated, they get angry, they disagree, they have a report button which they can hit to report an offensive post - or they pm a mod. He waits to receive that reported post notice or that pm. Whereas I will see an angry post and may immediately delete it before it has the chance to offend. Then I will copy the content and pm it to the poster and say, feel free to repost it without the swearing (or whatever it is that I think will offend). Alternatively I will nudge the poster and say "ouch, did you mean to sound that brutal?" and try and get modify what they posted.
It is tempting to view that in the light of obvious gender issues but I also think it is complex. I have had a million influences on how I respond to people and so has Dom. I am female / hot tempered / controlling and he is male / moderately cool tempered / very laid back. Even with similar values there is no way we would respond the same way, in fact we often do opposite things for the same reason.
I will have to try and find out some more about performativity that was rather complex even as a "for dummies" summary. :D